I've been playing this quite a bit the last few days. And by quite a bit, I mean I've spent MANY hours travelling in one direction, trying to find a smooth stone and get the game rolling.

The game's starting phase is hard - VERY hard. You need a smooth stone to study to even be able to begin to do anything and they don't respawn. This means, the area within an hours travel (In realtime that is) is totally overrun and emptied of anything of value because of all the new people.

Well, I finally found one after about 4 hours of travelling - The next step is trying to find some indian arrowheads to sell, to get enough money to pay a guide to take you out somewhere in the wilderness away from the starting area, Boston.

This took me another 3-4 hours, also since you cannot fast travel if you have anything in your inventory, and there is no large map, only a very very small minimap, making it very important you memorize the direction you are travelling (And the camera swiwels automatically in the direction you travel, aRRGGH).

Well - I managed to do this, all within the first 8-10 hours of my gametime, and thats what I meant by the game is hard!

Now, I was teleported out into the wilderness by a guide, and to a pretty awesome place - it was on a highly placed plateau, meaning I'm somewhat protected from enemies (Yes, people can kill you, and you will lose everything) and its not harvested by hundreds of other people.

Things have begun to pick up speed, and I have several skills now trained up and can make a lot of stuff myself.

My next big milestones should probably be to find more stuff to sell in town and get my humors (Stats) up a bit, so I can safely attack animals.

Is anyone else playing,. and want some help and perhaps to hook up as well? Someone already got Cain & Abel skill, meaning they can kill you..permanently.

So I got my beta key (really easy to do now, just visit the site) and this game is great! I'm totally addicted. It is a complex game, you have to really want to play it, but it is also really rewarding. The crafting is the best I've seen in a game since SWG. It's a really involved process to craft a lot of the things, some of which takes days to make or come to fruition. For example, to make a leather hat requires you to kill a critter for its hide. Then you dry the hide (first make a dryer, collect branches) which takes 8 rl hours. Then you prepare the hide with lime in a bucket (bucket requires a nail which you probably have to buy and a board, which requires a sawbuck, which requires wood and nails as well). You then put it in a tanning tub (again, boards and nails) and prepare the tanning fluid by taking a critter's brain and putting it in water and putting the water in the tub. Wait 8 hours and you get leather.

This certainly isn't going to appeal to everyone . But I like the depth involved.

Permadeath really adds an interesting dynamic to the game. You have to be suspicious of everyone. When you see someone, you don't know their name unless you make them kin (friend) and they allow it. Otherwise you can memorize people and give them your own name. Like early on I had a guy come into our camp and steal some of our stuff, so I memorized him as "Asshole" . The vast majority of encounters I've had with people in the game has been positive. But it's hilarious when you come off a game like SWTOR where you have a thousand people sitting on the fleet running around and jumping and then you come to this game where any time you see someone you need to be very careful and potentially log off before he can attack you. The skill to murder someone is extremely expensive and difficult to get. I'm looking forward to getting it down the road .

Me and a couple OO'ers have a good sized settlement coming along nicely. We started with 4, but 1 has entered his busy time of the year and not around much and another only logs on rarely. Two of us are way too active, though. If anyone would like to join us we have plenty of room!